The effects of synonym/antonym Vs. Collocation

on young intermediate EFL learners '

.vocabulary learning

By: Mobin Bozorgi mobinbozorgi@yahoo.com

Vocabulary Acquisition

Direct Instruction

Syn. /Ant.

Incidental

Collocation

Contextual Clues : 1.Definition 2.Synonym 3. Antonym 4.Inference

Research Questions In order to achieve the purpose of this study, the following

research questions will set forth:

1. Do synonyms and antonyms have any statistically significant effect

on the performance of EFL students’ vocabulary learning ?

2. Does providing collocations have any statistically significant effect

on the performance of EFL students’ vocabulary learning?

3. Which one of these contextual clues, synonyms and antonyms or collocations,

seems to be more effective on the performance of EFL students’ vocabulary learning?

Participants :

The study will be carried out among pre-intermediate students who are studying Interchange book 1 (Richards, 2013). The participants are going to be 60 female students, with an age range of 17-23 who will be divided into one control group and two experimental groups.

Instruments : 1. 80 English content words

2.Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) 3. Lesson Plan 4.Two parallel vocabulary tests

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS); developed by Wesche and Paribakht (1997).

1 .I don't remember having seen this word before .

2. I have seen is word before but I don't know what it means.

3. I have seen is word before and I think it means...

4. I know this word. It means...

5. I can use this word in a sentence e.g ...

Data Collection :First, three intact groups of the students will be selected, For the next step, each of these groups are randomly selected as the first and second experimental groups and the control group, Then 80 English content words will be selected from the participants’ book(Choosing just the words which enjoy both synonym/antonym and collocation is among the first priorities), a Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS)is accompanied the list; VKS consists of five categories, Words which participants marks the first two categories are assumed to be unknown and therefore are going to be included in the experiment.Among these target words, I'm going to choose 35 words randomly and create two parallel achievement tests, I attempt to make the tests parallel in terms of length and the level of simplicity.

In order to pilot the teacher-made tests, the researcher is going to administer them to a parallel group of 20 students and then give them a 35-item pretest to the students who participated in the study.

I decided to employ a counterbalance design, i.e. while the control group and the first experimental group receive form A as the pretest ,

the second experimental group receives form B which will be shifted respectively in the posttest stage in order to reduce the test effect factor .

After administering the pretest, the researcher is going to present the participants with averagely 8 words, which are classified according to the topic of each session,during 8 sessions of the treatment period .Each word will be explained by a definition accompanied with an exemplary sentence .

While synonyms and antonyms of the target words are added to the exemplary sentences for the first experimental group, a sentence containing collocations will be added to for the second experimental group .

Example : Fabulous

Control Group To teach the word “Fabulous” in the control group, I'm going to define it as “extremely good” along with this sentence: Jane is a fabulous cook.

1st Exp. GroupIn the first experimental group having underlined the target word, the teacher writes its synonym and antonym:

Jane is a fabulous cookSYN : Wonderful, Great

ANT : Terrible

2nd Exp. Group For the second experimental group, the following sentence will be added instead of synonym/antonym :

The hotel was high above the lake, with a fabulous view.

Data Analysis :

At first, for determining the reliability of the teacher-made tests KR-21 will be used, to compute the final results, I will submit the data to SPSS analyses then by applying the T-test, I will compare the mean of the experimental groups’ scores with the mean of the control group ones to determine whether there is any significant difference between them.

Design : Among several research designs, the one which seemed to best fit the research is a kind of quasi experimental design .This design is often used in classroom experiments where experimental and control groups are intact classes and are considered to be similar. The reason for choosing this design rested upon the fact that it is impossible for the researcher to assign the students randomly to language classes. According to this design, the experimental group receives the treatment while the control group doesn't. The presence of the control group in this design eliminates the problems related to internal validity.